Got in contact with a GE recruiter through an on-campus career fair. I spoke with the recruiter about the work I had done, basically pitched him my experience and projects. The recruiter mentioned that he had an opening that matched my experience, and he scheduled me for interview.
The 2-part interview process consisted of an in-person behavioral interview followed by a technical screen over the phone by an engineer on the team I would be working with. Both took around 90 minutes.
The behavioral interview was actually a pretty nice experience. The person interviewing me didn't go for the 'standard' HR questions and instead we just talked for awhile about relevant coursework and personal projects. He did open a few times with "tell me about a project in which ....blah blah", but it progressed naturally into an open dialogue. Following this phase, I was scheduled for a technical screen.
I was contacted by a GE engineer, and we set up a time which worked for both of us. For the next hour and a half I was grilled on the full spectrum of computer systems and software. The questions were generally more on the conceptual side, ranged in scope from straightforward to fairly in-depth. The interviewer did mention that he was asking questions intended for a full-time hire, and not to sweat out any incorrect answers. Below are a few questions I was asked:
1. Explain the Linux driver model, and how you would go about developing your own.
2. Walk me through the process of modifying an interrupt service routine in the Windows kernel.
3. Walk me through the general prologue and epilogue of a generic interrupt service routine.
4. What keyword in C would you use to indicate a variable will be modified outside of the local scope?
5. Let's say we have Host A and Host B on a LAN, both without established ARP entries. What happens when Host A pings Host B? (Wanted details on ARP discovery, IP address resolution, pertinent Wireshark commands, etc)
6. What is the stack used for, versus the heap?
7. What is realtime computing?
8. Tell me everything you know about process schedulers. (I hadn't touched scheduling in depth, so I talked about linux CPU governors and he seemed happy with that)
Following the technical screening (I'd say I got around 85% of his questions right), they presented an offer letter.